SPEAKER_00: hey everybody it's friday it's friday oh is it friday uh tons of news still happening but we're making it through the week we are and first up uh we're talking about on shoring on shoring some

Jason Calacanis: chips and stopping some exports of those chips the us is imposing some new restrictions on chip

SPEAKER_09: exports to china and then we make a detour a little uh detour and we talk about education and how broken education here is in this country and possible solutions to adding some competition or disruptiveness to that if we are in fact going to build all these factories here and uh start doing manufacturing again in america in a big way exactly and then uh we're gonna note some pretty

Jason Calacanis: shocking allegations against amazon that popped up on twitter and are going viral and we think

SPEAKER_13: are going to become a bigger story yes and we'll get into that uh with some uh trigger warnings uh

SPEAKER_15: when we get to that segment and then finally okay boomer it's friday so some good news about a third space where founders can go and uh maybe instead of going to college they can go to this third space and hang out in like a founder library with other aspirational founders the whole story arc it's

SPEAKER_19: gonna be a great show stick with us this week in startups is brought to you by linkedin jobs a business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters post your first job for free at linkedin.com slash twist masterworks is the first company allowing investors exposure into the blue chip artwork asset class twist listeners can skip the waitlist by going to masterworks.com slash twist and odoo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business your first app is free forever and right now odoo is offering one thousand dollars off your first implementation pack at odoo.com twist that's odoo.com twist all right it is friday we made it molly we made it look at us in our like somber

SPEAKER_26: we're like we put our black shirts on yeah i would like to kill this week that's right

SPEAKER_28: i just want you to know that i'm sending you a little hug from my garage studio to you

SPEAKER_29: ah yes thank you thank you well i mean listen high class problems right um yeah lots of news in the

SPEAKER_30: news uh if you haven't been watching the news it's been like a lot of news a little bit of a like

SPEAKER_32: it's like a news we i started a news slack channel by the way at our organization for our investment team

Jason Calacanis: because there's so much news yeah i was like you know it seems like it could be useful twist taping thing is so great like let's just keep up on the industry and trends and whatever yeah yeah yeah but

SPEAKER_32: now i have to now i have to resist the urge to be like did you see what happened with jenny thomas

SPEAKER_30: you know like that's gonna well yeah you know i think with the uh distractions at work uh some people are sensitive to it some people are good at multitasking so you have to always like think that

Jason Calacanis: through uh we're just putting in like vc stuff like yeah industry you know kind of message up top

SPEAKER_30: as to what the intention of it is like things that would professionally develop the organization right great idea here's what this is for so this is and here's what it's not for right that's where always gets people in trouble molly is the um creating slack channels that you know don't have

Jason Calacanis: a defined purpose or um ground rules i'll say like you know like random bad in fact maybe i'll change the name to like vc news or tech news or investment news yeah notable news or something like nobody's

SPEAKER_32: putting out any politics like we didn't that's not the you know it was like yeah we like a channel where we talk about things that are happening in the tech industry and investing pd yeah i think

SPEAKER_30: great yeah i would say put things in this channel that would provide significant benefit for the team to discuss or know about something to that effect because you may get somebody who is like oh you know you know that person like the uncle who forged you every news story and they're like molly you care about the environment check this out there's two for one solar panels for sale in in my local newspaper and i clipped it for you and i sent it to you with a post-it on it yeah you got my god my grandma no

SPEAKER_52: my grandma was that my grandma sent the clippings i'm that uncle oh i'm that uncle now yeah i'm turning

SPEAKER_56: into that uncle oh is this tertiary tertiary related to you here you go exactly yeah it's always great

SPEAKER_30: it's always great when somebody gives their screenplay and or business plan for a pizzeria to my dad when he was a bartender to give to me and then my dad has to you know set up a phone call with me to

SPEAKER_09: discuss it and i'm like dad i don't don't invest in pizzeria what am i supposed to do with this person gave me three copies of the business plan one for you one for mark cuban one for elon one there's

SPEAKER_30: this one here for larry page i'm like throw them in the garbage i don't even know that last

SPEAKER_59: they're bound i understand they're bound they're bound oh that's amazing i mean they're bound all

Jason Calacanis: right well anyway speaking of news speaking of news the us um of course recently passed the chips act the bipartisan chips act to jump start manufacturing of semiconductors and stuff here in the united states now uh the commerce department as of today this morning has issued new very strict restrictions on exporting and selling advanced computing chips chip making equipment and other products to china so now if you're nvidia say or if you're some uh you know if you're intel or you're an american-based company like micron you need a special license to export like gpus like really high performance chips that power ai applications or you know help model nuclear blasts or guide hypersonic weapons like if you want to sell those in china or even taiwan you now need a special license from the commerce

SPEAKER_30: department i didn't even know that we were making those here if i'm being totally honest like i but i guess some of these advanced chips are being made here i did see that micron uh i saw biden touting that micron was going to invest up to a hundred billion dollars on a chip factory in upstate new york now i always hear these claims and it's like hmm that's a very large number a hundred billion dollars like and i guess it's 20 it's it's as much as a hundred billion and they plan on spending 20 billion i guess this deck so uh some caveats there to the number sometimes they add together like big numbers

Jason Calacanis: and whatever but it's still a lot chip boundaries yeah the fabs you know the actual um plants where these things are fabricated yeah are phenomenally expensive like insanely difficult to build because they're they're basically i don't know if you've ever been to one but they're basically like clean rooms yeah do you remember those old intel commercials where they have the guys walking around in the the hazmat suits and stuff and it's because these are such high precision you can't have any dust in there like it's any specific semiconductor facility can cost like minimum 10 billion dollars

SPEAKER_30: right and then intel and texas instrument instruments those are also uh doing massive investments in

SPEAKER_09: chip manufacturing here this seems like finally our government is doing something proactive and smart which means the one thing this makes me a little nervous that they have information that this taiwan situation is going to become acute because this is an awful lot of like you can't oh yeah yeah so like

SPEAKER_30: they have inside information that we don't have i always think about that when people talk about

SPEAKER_47: ukraine or taiwan i'm like well we have 20 of the information i don't know i always think about that

SPEAKER_11: when i'm screaming back at my phone listening to all in well no i mean a lot of folks haven't told you

SPEAKER_09: i mean you could know the entire history of russia ukraine listen to your crazy uncle could have

SPEAKER_30: listened to every podcast and read every book on this stuff you know and smart people do read a lot of books and they do have great insights right you just may not know you're still not getting classified

SPEAKER_15: briefings exactly and so yeah they're all at mar-a-lago in the basement good point actually

SPEAKER_78: any of us could read them by pretending to be a vanderbilt sure you can go find them um but yeah no i

Jason Calacanis: mean i think you're absolutely right like even the even a high level assumption that china could eventually invade taiwan is not never should have been off the table yeah and so this like cutting off these avenues of dependence is really important but it is interesting that we're restricting these exports now before all these plants have been built right like right now we have a lot of promises intel said it would do 20 billion dollars worth of plants in arizona but they they take

SPEAKER_71: years to spin up like we're probably a decade away from full production so the fact that we're

Jason Calacanis: restricting exports now is a little risky because if china in return said okay well you can't have any chips from here there's still tsmc which is in taiwan yes which is still you know in the clear and that's apple's biggest um that's where apple makes all its chips and then tons and tons of companies get their chips from tsmc but if china did invade taiwan and all of a sudden tsmc was like

SPEAKER_30: not exporting to us available yeah we could have hard drive shortages we could have an issue phone shortages i mean this is one of these very challenging problems like energy chips and energy

SPEAKER_09: seem very analogous and same with pharmaceutical drugs now when you look at each one of these each country has a different uh challenge we're so lucky here in the united states that we found

SPEAKER_30: um fracking and shell i'm not saying those are good things i don't want to see like you know some

SPEAKER_09: state you know fracked and and poisoning their water tables and all that kind of stuff i think we have to do it very intelligently but the fact that we're not sitting here one worrying about winter like germany is is is really important and i i think this road to resiliency is something every country has to invest in and this is something like on a bipartisan basis that we elected biden to do he

SPEAKER_15: was supposed to be like this old guy who came from a different era where people could work with somebody across the table and then go you know disagree with them about you know some you know um cultural issues

SPEAKER_09: or whatever stylistic issues but hey it's in all americans benefit from energy resiliency chip resiliency and pharmaceutical lower prices and so that's great to see that they're working together finally

SPEAKER_89: these incompetent morons in washington are getting something done together well that is for the american people like we need to be resilient on chips we need to be resilient on pharmaceuticals we need resilient on um energy let's go yeah let's go i don't want to deal with any of these dictators anymore it's like this overhang of anxiety and how great would it be if we're like yeah we don't need your chips we don't need your drugs we don't need your masks and what this requires you know what the other shoe that has to drop here is we have to take our immigration system and we're going to need to overhaul it to make sure that we have people to work in these factories you know and some of them will be automated of course robotics we get it but other things that require humans and so we're going to need to let some people in if we don't have too many job openings these days every new

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Jason Calacanis: like politics friday but the other the other last shoe that has to drop is that we have to make the commensurate investments in education and that is the one thing we have not done in this country for like a half freaking century and we were talking we were talking in our chat about globalization like we do and you know there was this sense that globalization will lift all boats right that but it has yeah it has and it does but in the short term some boats sink and so we pushed through you know for in the last 30 years under 100 the clinton administration and the obama administration these were very pro globalization administrations that couldn't then or didn't or couldn't get through republican congresses equal and opposite investments in education and training and retraining and upscaling and and shoring up patching the freaking holes in the bottom of the boats in the rural parts of this country that then went on to vote for trump and we're still not doing it like we're still

SPEAKER_27: not with your silver bullet you got a silver bullet act with investment it's just freaking money like it's got to be what's your silver bullet for education because we spend more than any

SPEAKER_30: country like we're we're what's really off here is our spend is absurdly high per student and our results are you know mid at best so what's your solution i mean is that true that we are spending oh yeah yeah i mean if you pull up a list of uh spending per student education table in the world

Jason Calacanis: yeah boom nick found it okay the u.s spends more on education than any other country but students like behind academically here mess how much oh yeah yeah you know this is one i've i've gone down the

SPEAKER_15: rabbit hole in the u.s in 2017 we spent 12 800 per student on public education um and then we are u.s ranked 38th in math and 24th in science when compared to 71 other countries it's so pathetic i mean

SPEAKER_89: that is a poly yeah i you know i saw this problem start we were talking about this in the group chat

SPEAKER_15: um i saw this start when i was in high school now i in 1984 brother bonte at sovereign high school gave

SPEAKER_114: me a 62 average on math 65 was passing if you hit 63.5 they would uh let you take like one test

SPEAKER_30: you got like one final thing and you skip school brother bonte decided to teach me a lesson because uh jacal in when he was 13 14 years i was a little bit of a punk he gave me a 62 just to send me a message and my summer was ruined i had to go to six weeks every day for an hour and a half of math uh every

SPEAKER_06: morning and it was the first class i'm with you in math summer solidarity i had to do the same thing for

SPEAKER_30: geometry now this was a blessing for me yeah because i realized it is up to you to not ruin your summer you have control over this so i thank brother bonte for doing this to me um and then i watched as

SPEAKER_15: i hired people when i became a business owner over time basic arithmetic math and writing just you know faltered and people couldn't do basic math they couldn't do division they didn't know how to do a percentage and i was like what's going on here and i think what happens we just made accommodations

SPEAKER_89: and we just passed people instead of forcing people to actually pass and i think this is a great disservice we've done so now we're spending all this money but we're not holding teachers or people accountable i think it's competition has to come this has been a failed experiment for three decades four decades i don't know how many decades it's the only thing i think that does this is a radical amount of competition i just had a very basic idea let me see what you think of this okay

SPEAKER_119: because i know people are very passionate about public school i don't know it's really complicated

SPEAKER_11: right there's not a silver bullet but i'm coming around to your competition i mean honestly the only silver bullet i've ever seen in my life is competition disruption works exactly so here's my

SPEAKER_30: competitive idea we do an experiment you don't have to do this in every state you just do this in one state and see how it goes you can do it in one city that really has terrible enough a city where you

SPEAKER_09: have nothing to lose you just take like the four most important tests and you tell private companies come up with whatever service you want we'll give you four thousand dollars a student

SPEAKER_30: it could be in person you could give them an ipad a laptop it could be video conference we don't

SPEAKER_09: care what it is you got four thousand per student to make these students awesome at math and you got four thousand dollars for making these other group of students incredibly you know just perfect sat scores four thousand per student and we're going to give you the ones you know in three strata like bottom mid bottom you know uh lowest quartile second lowest quartile and then you know the middle and we're going to see how you do for each one and depending on how many standard deviations they go up on the standardized testing i know it's not perfect but it's something that is administered by another company we will give you an incentive bonus if they go up one well that's what you got the 4k for but if they go up two you're going to get an extra 2k per student and we just make it like a marauding capitalist where some founders go you know what some yc founders launch founders found university founders go i could solve that problem i want six k per student i'll get every one of those students i'll get a thousand students a year from the bottom to the mid and i'll get six thousand make six

SPEAKER_89: million dollars i know how to build that software i know how to build that live video conference i'll have every saturday every day at 5 to 10 pm we'll have online tutors and we'll have tutors from around the world we'll pay them 100 bucks whatever it is come up with a really good solution yeah and crush it

Jason Calacanis: because we're not getting our money's worth anyway no and i think we're getting snowed i think we're i think the pandemic could end up being a turning point for education that way like you're seeing enrollment tank yes you know people are just like oh it turns out homeschooling works way better that's a form of competition it is a it always takes society longer to get where you want them to be then you or it takes longer than you wish you know it's sort of like like one simple example is now all of a sudden everybody's realizing oh hey if you start school later that's way better for kids it's like what better for their brains and the earlier you start you're talking about time of day they get a literal time

SPEAKER_27: of day yeah 10 to 5 would be better 10 to 5 would be perfect for kids and teenage brains right and their biology but the thing is like i read that in that freakonomics guy's book 20 years ago before i

SPEAKER_52: even had a kid yeah and it's like stopping that it takes so much longer well not no i mean teachers would like it too it's parents who are driving to school or to work uh well they could drop them off

SPEAKER_09: and just have them do like exercise or you know whatever when they get there they could do something

SPEAKER_47: other than would have to like provide that and right yeah why are schools eight hours a day where are they seven hours a day instead of 12 like well they should be open the whole 12 hours okay now we're just

Jason Calacanis: asking those questions right why are they and and i mean i'm i'm sorry like i agree with you this is

SPEAKER_27: an entrenched system you have we spend all this money on schools but the teachers i know in public school are literally running donors choose fundraisers to get like a new carpet because that money is going to administrators and real estate and all of these things that aren't really it translates to 15 000 per student that's not where that money goes that's that does not make it on the plate it's like some

SPEAKER_142: restaurant where like it doesn't make it on the plate right and teachers are still buying all their own

Jason Calacanis: supplies you know so it's just like this is a busted system and as much as i respect those teachers

SPEAKER_09: yeah break it down get uber in here you know i mean the teachers unions are fighting for the rights of their teachers that's their job we get it but at some point somebody's got to be held accountable here and it's it is it the administrators is it you know the machine writ large is it you know the teachers unions plus the administrators who knows like all you have to all you need to know is look at the results at a certain point i don't want to get into like hand-wringing over who's most at fault this it's a failed system it's a failed system that's it that's all you need to know it is and i say

SPEAKER_27: that with all respect to my sister-in-law the public school teacher like i was the auction mom who raised money for my school i have nothing but respect for the people within the system

SPEAKER_09: it is also a failure it's a failure and there i'm sure there's corruption in there i'm sure there's incompetence in there i'm sure there's a bunch of bureaucrats getting paid twice as much three times as much as the teachers and doing nothing that's exactly what's happening when like the oakland

SPEAKER_27: school superintendent got run out of the district because he had hired 300 fake employees this was a school that was under state this was a district that was under state receivership for decades because it was like bankrupt and all this stuff turned out this guy had made up 300 jobs and basically embezzled the money and you know what he did scampered to dc and got hired

Jason Calacanis: it's unbelievable it's not teachers i mean there's the union part for sure but it's not individual

SPEAKER_89: teachers like that's it's the system myself canceled here school vouchers i i know like it's triggering for a lot of people oh public school is going to be a disaster if parents are not getting a

SPEAKER_09: good product for the 16 000 a year the parents who are suffering the most are the ones who can't

SPEAKER_89: afford to go to private school i guarantee you there's a parent or two who could get together five ten students and if you gave them that 75 or 150k i bet you they could create a better micro school

SPEAKER_15: yeah because the schools are terrible anyway so what do we have to lose is that is you know what this always comes down to so right and honestly without i mean when you look at like if you

Jason Calacanis: look at the history of south korea's dominance like its recent dominance right it's sort of march to global stage it all began with a super specific investment in education yes all of it and we just we gotta like we have to do that and it can't you're right it can't just be like shoveling money it's got to be a whole system of incentives and outcomes and yeah yeah and it's right now it's you know

SPEAKER_163: you the the really sad thing is they're changing i don't know if so the new york times story

SPEAKER_30: i didn't read the whole story i just skimmed it but there was a story about it you know i guess it

SPEAKER_09: was a chemistry class and like who's responsible like he can't fail students uh and they're not coming in prepared enough i hear this all the time you know that professor yeah the professor is like

SPEAKER_32: that was a really that was more complicated than it appeared it seems like a very complicated one but

SPEAKER_09: yeah i do hear anecdotally many times people come to college they get in yeah but they're not prepared and it's like we need this person needs a year or two of free college and it's like well that should have been high school it's like yeah that system's broken so the conveyor belt got them into college the college accepted and then they wind up failing out of college or they feel like they're stupid because they're sitting next to somebody and i was that soon i felt stupid sitting next to certain students and then i just took control of my own destiny but well not everybody has that or it's

Jason Calacanis: interesting because i think that new york times story that that university professor story actually goes specifically to what we were saying a minute ago is that that is equally likely to have been a massive administration failure in never dealing with because there's no accountability right there's the bs tenure thing and then nobody ever does any oversight and it seems like this might have been like a pretty bad professor with a whole 90s teaching style vibe that was never dealt with administratively and it took students being like this is bad and so you have that but basically the the end result here then we still agree busted system not working and we cannot win as a country

SPEAKER_15: yeah without that it's a disaster at the end of september there had only been 158 ipos in the us

SPEAKER_170: this year that's a 78 drop from last year so how are banks and institutions managing their capital well according to a recent mckinsey study major institutions typically have 30 to 50 percent of their portfolios in alternative assets and uh you know listen i invest in startups that's an alternative asset as well and i've also put a little bit of capital dipping my toe here into blue chip art and i'm using masterworks the largest investment platform for investing in contemporary art what they do is pretty simple they get a you know some legendary art piece like picasso or monet or banksy and you don't need to shell out 20 million i'm not doing that i'm not buying a 10 20 million dollar painting but i have bought a tiny sliver of one of these paintings and that's what masterworks does and they've delivered an average of 29 net returns to their investors since 2019 according to masterworks and they recently had an exit for a 33.1 return in august as volatility rocked the markets right so here's your call to action there is a huge wait list to join masterworks but you can skip the line and visit masterworks.com slash twist to do so once again masterworks.com slash twist to skip the line they got the dot com see important regulation a disclosures at masterworks.com cd but this what's happening in chips i think

SPEAKER_30: sometimes things have to break and i think it's such a good point like if you look at the chips thing

SPEAKER_09: like people in our government are obviously terrified whatever they know about what's going down in taiwan or a dependency on this has really shook them and now they're doing this and then in europe they're like what pipelines can we build to the middle east is there any country we can get stuff from

SPEAKER_30: biden talking about biden's good week he's like okay who's a less abrasive dictator who can get oil from and it's like uh the venezuelans i don't know like they didn't invade any countries they're right they're not like storming the beaches slightly less bad than the saudis right exactly yeah sorry okay okay the saudis or opec was you know jerking our chain okay find me another dictator find me

SPEAKER_09: another dictator who likes money yeah and let's give them some money now of course you don't want to enable another dictator but i would say take the strategic reserves and why are we not tripling them

SPEAKER_89: we're rich why don't we triple the reserves why don't we have three times as much for the next time this happens you know and let's build some more nukes stop shutting them down so sometimes in a way

Jason Calacanis: we are tripling the reserves by investing in renewable energy which is going to be decentralized right i mean we are tripling reserves in a different kind of way with a massive investment that's very exciting i think i feel like by the way remember when i was like did i come here at the worst possible time turns out no for once in my career i have perfect timing your timing is i'm investing

David Friedberg: chef's kiss chef's kiss it's it is chef's kiss timing because you know all this money is going to get

SPEAKER_15: poured into it on the road to resiliency we need to be all countries do this is the job of the government

SPEAKER_30: is to protect the citizens from you know uh unforeseen or things that take planning you know chips are going to take decades pharmaceuticals are going to take years and energy is going to take you know decades

Jason Calacanis: years to decades you know maybe it's going to take three decades there's going to be some stuff that happens in years and some stuff that happens in decades and the decades is going to be like fusion but but we're moving a hell of a lot faster than we thought we were going to hey you know but before

SPEAKER_30: we run out of time yes we were uh last night you sent me this thread i was at poker and i saw this thread and i'm i got very distracted at poker oh sorry wow i'm just like oh my lord you know this is so dark and uh we i we do need to reserve judgment of course on this because this hat this thread i couldn't find it in the news but the threat has now gone viral or i would say semi-viral a couple thousand retweets so maybe you could fill people in on what's going on with this amazon lawsuit

SPEAKER_15: and the alleged 60 minutes spiking of a story yeah cbs news spiking of a story yeah this is kind of this

Jason Calacanis: is one that you know full disclosure we debated whether we should talk about because we don't know all the details we know that this thread appeared from a lawyer a pretty high profile lawyer who represents a lot of people against big companies and she wrote an incredibly detailed thread last night um about two things one how she is involved in a lawsuit on behalf of a family whose son committed suicide on behalf of someone who committed suicide using chemicals that he bought on amazon um and the accusation is that starting as far back as april 2021 this law firm started urging amazon to stop selling what they are terming suicide kits because there's this chemical that you can buy on amazon and and evidently it's you know amazon's algorithm will recommend you should buy it with this and this and this and they've sort of shorthanded this to a suicide all right so here's what you said amazon was

SPEAKER_204: bundling sn this is the chemical yeah uh it's a salt of some kind and obviously sodium nitrate so amazon

SPEAKER_206: was building was sort of dodging it because i don't want anybody to go and buy it okay so just as a

SPEAKER_13: point of order here trigger warnings uh if you we're going to talk about suicide uh self-harm and if you are considering making a terrible decision please get help call you're loved and nobody wants to see you go so just get help immediately if you have any kind of thoughts even if it's just in the periphery you're worthy of talking to somebody and we love you and we don't want you to hurt yourself but we need to talk about this because it's important stuff yeah so amazon was bundling sn

SPEAKER_204: this is a specific chemical with other products to basically create a suicide kit okay so now this is a claim we all know how that bundling works you're buying guitars strings and it says hey do you want these picks and do you want this guitar tuner right it's a very nice feature on amazon it's algorithmic i

SPEAKER_15: believe i don't think that they have maybe they have a human look at it afterwards who knows but i do

SPEAKER_47: think that those bundles are algorithmic i think so in this case we should point out they probably are

Jason Calacanis: in this case the recommendation was that the purchaser of sn also buy tagamet which is uh to avoid vomiting up the poison so chemical to keep down the chemical a personal use scale to measure the proper quantity and the amazon edition of the peaceful pill handbook a suicide manual with an entire chapter on how to die by sn this was the bundle that people would be recommended when they go and search for this

SPEAKER_30: project so they were like that's you should stop that according to this lawyer again i am yeah and the next piece of this is she's claiming cbs news uh was going to do a story on this and spike so these are alleged and you know we so we we just want to be careful here but we want you to know

SPEAKER_204: about this news because it's this is obviously going to become a bigger story goldberg says amazon lawyers from perkins that's a very famous law firm told them amazon will continue to sell sn because they can't be held liable if someone uses one of their products for suicide okay i think she's saying

Jason Calacanis: this is a that fundamentally that amazon's lawyers according to carrie goldberg the lawyer for the family determine that this is effectively like a content moderation issue like a 230 that if just because this exists on amazon site and is algorithmically bundled with these other things does not make amazon responsible if someone uses it to commit suicide yeah um so so then she says yes that they were gonna they had been in contact with 60 minutes that they were gonna do a story about this that she had you know sought repeated assurances from the producers at cbs that they would actually run with this because it's so painful for these families to talk about having lost someone to suicide but that then they got to a certain point and cbs called and basically said we're we're not going to do

SPEAKER_203: the story and it seems like this keeps happening allegedly again you know all this is going to be

SPEAKER_13: um shaken out and uh we'll we'll get the final um truth here um and from the other side directly from then i'm sure and some press will probably cover this you know in detail and do some primary research here a few days after receiving a response from amazon goldberg says another person a 17 year old named tyler took his own life using this sn bought off amazon we did some our producers just did some basic research on it on amazon um and reading the reviews seems like people are using it uh for reef tanks for coral preservation uh in the comments refining precious metals uh less mentioned than the things and when our producers went to the page its kit was for coral reef stuff so perhaps there are actual uses

SPEAKER_09: for this so i this is one of these very tough situations where there might be uses for this that are

SPEAKER_15: justified and then there might be you know some other unforeseen technical ramifications like bundling things that shouldn't be bundled with it um and so primarily we wanted to flag this because

Jason Calacanis: i suspect that this is not the last we're going to hear about this story it is fundamentally a very similar question to many of the you know we talk about this in the context of social media all the time but everything is content and everything is moderation and if and even ai generated content if that if indeed an algorithm generated this bundle that people saw when they searched for this is is kind of up for debate in this way and also it's an absolutely horrible story right it's just god it's it's a very well crafted and very detailed thread about something that is 100 going to get a lot more

SPEAKER_83: attention so we just wanted to like plant the flag that yeah we don't know this one we don't know

SPEAKER_49: we yeah and you know attorneys uh you know uh act as a backstop in society in some cases to find

SPEAKER_30: these edge cases and make sure that they're solved other times yeah you know they could be chasing a payday we're we're open to all possibilities here but we wanted to talk about i mean i do remember

SPEAKER_15: this happened with google right exactly people were typing into google search hey how do i do this self-harm thing and google came up with it was became like a very intense discussion in the early 2000s uh you you must have covered it at cnet or remember that discussion and what they did was this wonderful

SPEAKER_09: thing that the industry got together and decided you know what would be good is people type this stuff

SPEAKER_172: in to put a suicide hotline up there and then to put stories and direct people to areas where they

SPEAKER_15: uh can get help same thing happened at wikipedia people were looking for methods and techniques to do bad things and they came together as a group and said okay we can't not have a page on the topic of suicide so we're going to have a thoughtful uh way of directing people who might be at that page for a wrong reason because some people might be at the page for an academic reason but there also might be

SPEAKER_09: or this is like there might be people for the coral reef reason uh you just have to think it through so

SPEAKER_15: so yeah yeah also it's terrible just and it's really heartbreaking heartbreaking but you know i i'm assuming the people at amazon have good faith i would just i'm assuming that like i don't know but

SPEAKER_89: they should definitely get out there in front of this and figure it out and then also cbs like

SPEAKER_15: really there i can't say i'm surprised about that at all yeah you worked at cbs right was cnet owned by

SPEAKER_11: cbs when you were there cnet was owned by cbs i'm not surprised i mean i i will tell you i was aware of

Jason Calacanis: similar amazon's amazon is very aggressive with news outlets oh really very aggressive in fact i at the new york times know someone who was kind of taken off the beat because of sustained pressure they

SPEAKER_237: didn't like the beat reporter amazon used their influence to pressure pressure pressure

SPEAKER_68: hmm yeah very aggressive wow yeah so i'm not i'm not in the least and cbs is a media outlet outlet that's so you know i mean i'm not yeah i could see that happening i could imagine that

Jason Calacanis: happening and it's it sort of ends up being this like doubly disappointing thing well i mean if you

SPEAKER_37: don't know the jeffrey uh we gar weekend uh 60 minutes right you can look that up but it was the

SPEAKER_09: um what was the movie uh the the insider really amazing movie about tobacco and so you know this doesn't feel like a big tobacco level scandal but it definitely um yeah the insider's incredible film have you seen that russell crowe no yeah maybe oh you gotta watch it this weekend i mean anybody if you haven't ever if you've never seen this movie i think it's like russell crowe's best performance along with gladiator um he put he basically plays the uh person who did the research on how bad tobacco was for you and then you know his research got canned and then oh yeah so he was he was the original

SPEAKER_83: whistleblower yes totally i have seen that um but maybe clearly i need to watch it again

Jason Calacanis: um so anyway all right now twitter is the uh the whistleblowing platform of choice in some ways it is

SPEAKER_09: where uh yeah it's a very important platform i understand and yeah it's very important that we keep

SPEAKER_246: that platform all right you know operationally tight let's make a let's make a hard tone turn here

Jason Calacanis: okay let's do it yes sorry um because it is friday that is all the news we have for you today we will be keeping an eye on that story over the weekend and beyond but right now we got okay boomer we got ami and on two co-founders of this community group called versi joining rachel this week on okay boomer versi is this really interesting uh experiment that kind of goes back to our education conversation

SPEAKER_27: they're trying to build a physical space and community for college age kids age 18 to 25 who are not

SPEAKER_170: going to college listen if you're a founder or an employee at a startup it's critical that you become capital efficient fundraising is tough right now so cutting burn is really important and one great way to cut costs is to run all of your sass apps on one platform and that's odoo using odoo's suite of business apps means you won't have a bunch of messy sass subscriptions everything you need is already on odoo all you have to do is turn it on when you're ready and they'll only charge you for the apps you use odoo has over 40 main apps and over 16 000 apps from their open source community we're talking about sales we're talking about accounting marketing automation hr website builders and so much more and this will streamline your business no more issues transferring data back and forth and you'll have one customer support contact across all your apps not 20. odoo is the only software your company will ever need you're going to get more done in less time and save a ton of money and here is the best part your first app is free forever and odoo is offering a one thousand dollar credit on your first implementation pack so go to odoo.com twist for one thousand dollars off that is odoo.com twist okay boomer i understood the assignment thank you so much amy and on for coming

SPEAKER_257: on this segment of okay boomer amy and on are two of the co-founders of versi which was the first place that has ever asked me to moderate which was awesome um a ton of people i know have been talking about versi they've been talking about going to co-work at your guys's space and i'm sure with new york city tech week coming up you guys are going to be talked about a lot more so i thought this is probably a really good time to have you on so again thank you guys howdy howdy thanks for having us so

SPEAKER_258: first things first what is versi because i know it's not just a co-working space basically short short

SPEAKER_261: tldr is um that this behind every like progress driven dynamic society has been a library-like institution that serves as kind of like a cultural collision hub um that ends up like catalyzing a lot of this debate and learning and um community and academic growth um so like examples of this have been the greeks um with acropolis or india with nalanda the bauhaus library in germany but currently there aren't that many kind of library-like institution institutions um today universities and schools are not really able to fulfill this role in society as much um and we're in the age of like a lot of self-directed learning um a lot of dropouts uh a lot of entrepreneurship there's a lot of free information that that's being democratized um the classic example that on gives a lot is um kind of like mit courses being available to a lot of people now um which is before they were only available at mit um and so we kind of want to build uh libraries of future where um we have kind of a new learning environment that lets community with physical space resources and visualized programming and kind of be able to build these libraries all across the world um basically these cultural collision hubs and um in every city so i have a question about um you're talking about libraries

SPEAKER_258: here right so when i think of libraries i'm a part of the new york city public library it offers like a ton of things outside of just renting books i rent audiobooks through their app um they host like events that you can go to they offer free resources what makes you guys different than somebody wanting to be a

SPEAKER_268: part of something like a community library in a city yeah so like uh for context i'm and i both kind of dropped out all of our friends dropped out built our own companies built our own sort of like successful projects organizations on the side um that grew into like um our entire careers and livelihoods um and one thing that we noticed we were missing was just like this the kind of support the kind of like socialization the kind of community um that exists within something like college or something like basically like a community of like like-minded people that are all working together to to achieve something right like we had no resources to i guess drop out or chase this like unconventional path whereas um in college if you're on a conventional path you have teachers you have tutors you have um peers on the same on wavelength and trying to bounce ideas off each other to go reach the same goals but if you're someone that wants to start their own company what do you do like you go to an incubator maybe um but a lot of the stuff that i guess college provides could be reshaped and reformed in this new

SPEAKER_270: age of like infinite learning infinite information um of individual career paths right so instead of a library where you just get books or where you get like maybe some programming you get um say you're starting a fashion brand the ideal version of versi is like you have a vision or a goal of your life in a passion and mission that is not catered to you um via traditional means but you still want to pursue it so we'll help you with basically the infrastructure to drop out to chase that dream so examples like a fashion brand we'll find you fashion mentors we'll find you um help you build like a manufacturing base help you do all these things that are aligned and we can help you on an individual basis rather than um like a cookie cutter like you go through school you go through a curriculum what we have the most experience in is like is like startups and like um tech entrepreneurship so like if you come into our program we'll help you find investors we'll help you find talent we'll help you find um we'll like coach you like all of us to build tech companies we can all help each other build tech companies um and kind of like mentor each other it's much more like the infrastructure to chase your own path rather than is just like another building of books and

SPEAKER_272: some social life programming yeah this is a such a this is such a good idea i did graduate from

SPEAKER_258: college i feel like sometimes i'm an anomaly in the little tech world i don't meet that many people that go to college nor do i meet that many people who went to a state school i went to penn state i loved it and one of the big reasons why i liked it was that community factor that you're talking about because the school really is kind of in the middle of nowhere there's not too much happening around it except for the beautiful town of state college pennsylvania um you really do have to like engage in the school whereas if you went somewhere like nyu you're surrounded by the city so your community looks a little bit different i think having these like focused communities first off i think they're motivating like i was around a bunch of other people that also really enjoyed their time at penn state my college was called ist and a lot of people like aspire to do things like in the tech industry so that's really nice but also kind of like you're talking about with the infrastructure of like the mentorship you have that in college i never really thought about that how of course a ton of our friends have been able to drop out start companies but finding that mentorship is a ton harder when you're surrounded by kids um that are our age and not people that have had experience are the people giving this like mentorship and this advice people that are our age are they people that have maybe like a few more years under their belt like where are these mentors

SPEAKER_267: coming into play it's kind of both right so when you think about college like i think you get the main

SPEAKER_268: value of like instruction information from two different sources um one is like the professors that are just like this is their domain expertise right people that have that have seen a million iterations of this subject and they can guide you along like the broad strokes um but then the second value of college and like i think the main value proposition of college is actually the community and the network that you build um it's just people the peers you learn from and like the people on a similar ambition and path as you that you can kind of align and go together with right like um ami and i have been in hacker houses where we're all just like building together like i don't know how to then maybe like position that's widget or something and someone that's sitting across the table with me is like oh i know how to do this is used dude like it's a very easy fix here so i think it's twofold right like if you assemble the right amount of people together that's already miracle in itself and you can already create a lot of magic it's like spark isc or or like stanford's arts community club if you put the right people together they'll make a lot of magic anyway and then the second form that is like while that's super valuable you also would benefit a lot from people that's just like seeing a bunch of reps like just like like vps at important companies that that just like want to show you like

SPEAKER_280: the the they've just seen enough you know they it's a different kind of mentorship that someone

SPEAKER_282: super experienced like that offers so i would say both got you that's awesome and with these like

SPEAKER_258: spaces and it almost reminds me you already mentioned hacker houses about to say this reminds me of like an extended hacker house but it also kind of reminds me of like co-living spaces so we recently had on ben from goal house and goal houses this really awesome like co-living space do you guys ever see like first in the future get it getting even into like co-living or do you think

SPEAKER_284: these libraries and these like communal working spaces are really where your focus is yeah i think

SPEAKER_261: at the end of the day like lifestyle is something that that we're focused on um so like right now we're really not focused on co-living but um eventually maybe maybe we'll think about it um i think what what matters most to us is creating these collision spaces so whether it be in living scenarios or whether it be in working or um you know while you're reading or while you're just meeting other people um we just want to create those kinds of spaces and the the best way to do that right now in our opinion is to be able to build these kind of like library like um spaces for other people and so we're not kind of like crossing it off and i have a huge background actually in co-living but yeah um

SPEAKER_288: for now we're not we're not also i'm pursuing it full-time or not so i guess that has to uh i can

SPEAKER_258: bring up the how you and i met actually i met ami in a really cool way i was at miami hack week and ami had a house of people which was really awesome and i was like who organized this and i thought going into your house i was like oh this must have been like i don't know like a company and organization i didn't know that it was kids under the age like some people are teenagers by you know when they're setting up these houses at um miami hack week and i'm not sure if it's just that hack week where in particular where it's people that young setting up houses but you you have a ton of experience and not only setting up co-living spaces but setting up events and you know now with versi like this really does seem like such a natural path so it's really cool seeing you get into this um i think this is a really cool time to mention your background and on's background because you both have really really cool things behind you and this i don't want to say versi seems like expected but it really makes sense that you guys are part of you know making this happen yeah i can give like a really

SPEAKER_261: brief um background and yeah um also i think um some other team members and some other members on our team also have like a really interesting background um so i want to highlight that as well but um i grew up between um tokyo and new york um attended actually like public school in both places um i actually didn't like really touch tech um most of the time i uh wasn't like went to music school and um to soccer and um that was kind of my main focus for most of my life um i then kind of emerged into tech uh end of high school beginning of college um and originally started working in startup just like pay the bills um but then kind of started like building a lot of these like student entrepreneurship communities um helped like build and scale about a bunch of like ed tech sas startups and kind of getting into the group of like these growth and community rules and then for the last two two and a half years i've literally just been um doing a lot of these like community type roles whether it be um launching digital communities for like politicians or celebrities or um setting up like a bunch of hacker houses like you mentioned or content houses or working with a bunch of consumer companies um it's all been kind of around uh like how do we empower young builders and um creators and um just people who are ambitious and are dreamers

SPEAKER_288: so that's been like the last two years three years for me um and i dropped out of school um um at some point uh while i was doing all of that very cool and how about you did you did you have any

SPEAKER_267: time um mine very abbreviated version in high school i started a ministry program for low-income students

SPEAKER_268: about 100 people starting about a thousand or so low-income students around kansas nevada then uh with northeastern um kind of studied like five different things at once um and uh i actually went on a co-op program so northeastern has this really cool thing where um it's like it's very experiential focus like every student goes on like two to three co-ops which are like six month internships instead of going to school for a semester um and i ended up going on a co-op um at jpl in la and instead of going back to school i just dropped out and started my own company and i started the company online on discord and i had to learn all that other stuff on my own it was really fun um so i i recently left that company because i didn't find a sense of like community of like young people to build with like i kind of missed like being at school or being with like my group of like hacker houses i was like building with young people like i need that energy i need that um ambition and drive and it's just like it's different um and it's like a lot harder to do alone especially like covid was happening it was a lot harder to do alone and with like i guess older people um and so i kind of just like focused on building with my friends um after leaving that and ami was working on this thing and i was like hey like this sounds really interesting i want to i want to help out um and we kind of found ourselves kind of like facing the same problems like young builders are not properly networked they have no idea what to do um it's really easy to help them you just connect them and kind of show them what we've learned in the past year or two um give them really cool experiences because like we're young like we're we're all broke and like it's pretty easy to please like if you put us all in a hacker house in miami like that's sick like that's like a lot of value and a lot of magic happens there as well um and so that's kind of how i came across and i started working on podcasts of like young builders and nowadays i just like focus on how to help young people work on stuff that really matters instead of like the more traditional paths that they are i guess forced to do usually

SPEAKER_258: yeah very and you uh i have to say you have one of the coolest websites personal websites i always joke that um you know the easier like not even joke this is pretty serious i'm like yeah it's more the more simple the website the easier it is um for somebody to like go and remember and obviously so it bugs me sometimes when i see dot xyz and i know now it's pretty popular but at the time um like two years ago when i first really started seeing people use xyz i was like oh who's use.com yours is just on an.vu which is nuts yeah and you guys have versi.com how the heck

SPEAKER_309: how did you guys get that url you know people like that you know people do you have to buy that off

SPEAKER_267: somebody uh yeah we did buy the first seat of man i saw him but the like yes it is oh my gosh that's nice it's but it what it isn't a word so like it's a bit cheaper like it feels like um like i don't know

SPEAKER_268: uh universe.com it'd be it'd be a lot harder to find but since it's not an actual word it's like sounds like a official-ish word okay it's a lot easier to get um and actually on.vu is like from

SPEAKER_267: some like island country that i have no idea existed before this um i used to go.vu see if it existed and it was like when i first signed up for it it was like the domain registrar page was like in pure

SPEAKER_268: html like vanilla html and like not styled at all i was like this is the sketchiest thing but if i can get on.vu that'd be that my life would be made and so i like put my put my credit card in and like

SPEAKER_258: hope for the best and it actually it actually penned out so i'm like looking right now to see if there's r-a-c-h dot e-l like e-l that sounds like it might be a domain oh yeah but like that is that is really cool so very cool that you guys got the domain for um for versi but you said this already versi is not a real word um i did some research before and there's like some stuff that's like kind of correlated with it but i'm like okay like what is why versi what does it mean why did you choose it

SPEAKER_292: yeah um i can there there's there's two two thoughts around this um one is um we were really

SPEAKER_261: shooting for like thinking about a lot of universities and how can we innovate on traditional higher education um and so universities and cities is something that we're like thinking about a lot as well network states um and so the combination of the two um was something that like we we thought might be interesting so we see is kind of that natural progression um the second funnier

SPEAKER_292: part of that story is we actually um cross-checked with like seo and we also cross-checked with um a bunch of other things but essentially used gpt3 to generate versi um and yeah um yeah so so we just like yeah literally used gpt3 and versus one of the results and it made the most sense in terms of like branding and also seo and also um the domain was super cheap um

SPEAKER_288: for like dot com and everything else as well um we were able to negotiate that down and um yeah but

SPEAKER_261: it also just made sense into a broader sense of um kind of tackling this this non-traditional um

SPEAKER_262: pathway for higher education yeah so like what next thing you're going to tell me is like dolly made your guys's freaking logo out here um how many people are actually behind your company

SPEAKER_261: um so we have four full-time people right now um and just a amazing um team of part-time people as

SPEAKER_288: well um so around four people and then um just like amazing community members and amazing friends and it's just a village of people um who are just empowering us and empowering us and i'm in the space all the time and i'm contributing so um yeah i can't do it without them so i'm super grateful for

SPEAKER_258: them that's you yeah i i love going to your guys's uh co-working space i've been there now like i said you guys are the first people that ever asked me to moderate anything which has been cool love seeing people that come out to to listen like this last time uh okay boomer guest previously jules chirp back she's come on twice now is a really good friend of mine and really knowledgeable in this space and one thing i noticed about the people that even came and listened is nobody was on their phone when we were talking which felt really really cool so you guys are obviously bringing in some pretty engaged people or maybe uh jules and i and cleo um had a lot of good things to say but regardless

SPEAKER_331: you're just so interesting yeah maybe you're just a killer moderation amazing moderator you guys have

SPEAKER_258: great people coming in they're serious about what they're doing they're really respectful the space is awesome it's almost gives me um i would say like we works give off like millennial vibes like you go and i'm like oh man this gives me like i don't know it's obviously different if you're if you're younger and for me like i graduated during the pandemic so working from home and it is nothing crazy because i've never worked from an office so when i go to a we work and i see people that are going to we works because they a lot of them miss you know going into the office and this is pretty broadly speaking um i don't feel that like i i like working from somewhere that's not my bedroom obviously but like i don't have that need to like go into an office so a lot of the things that are catered in we works um to like replicate that office feeling i never had so going to versi in some place that people understand that like i i never worked like i i'd like a call booth but other than that like i don't really know what i want in an office space you know you guys really are awesome with um hosting events and doing game nights and other things and for tuck week coming up do you guys

SPEAKER_261: have anything planned yeah um a lot so uh we're doing like um co-working every day and so we're opening up our unique square space for kind of broader community to be able to come in and use it during um kind of off times or times they need to work in between events and stuff um but yeah we're also doing like a bunch of events um so doing like a panel with um gc and tmv um we're doing like a salon about network states and community i'm calling it citizenship 2.0 doing like a lunch with brux and republic and all the dinners and everything in between so um yeah yeah super excited about it

SPEAKER_258: are you gonna be there oh you know it you know i'm gonna be there and where if people wanted to sign up uh for versi or see your events is there a twitter page or a website they can go to yeah so

SPEAKER_261: um twitter is versi at versi social um and our website is versi.com so that's v-e-r-c-i.com um and on the top left you'll also see new york tech week and so we have a whole page around new tech week um but also our season zero that's launching soon so your season what zero oh that's kind of cool so what's season zero um essentially we're experimenting with a three month season um so it's kind of like a huge founding membership season um where people not only kind of get access to the space 24 7 um but we're really kind of honing in on a lot of the program we're speaking about a lot of the mentorship resources and capital portals and um everything in between um that we've spoken about um so building that out and building that out with our community and with people is kind of

SPEAKER_258: what season zero is is mostly focused on oh that's so exciting so really fun to see you guys during an on i know you are not based in new york you're based out and you know anywhere that's not new york l.a

SPEAKER_280: uh so you bouncing around asia where are you right now you're in new york right now i'm in l.a right now but yeah i'm in new york all the time so i'm sure i'll see you guys awesome and if people wanted

SPEAKER_258: to connect with you two uh about events or you know checking out the versi space where can they

SPEAKER_267: find you guys my twitter is on dot vu but the dots both are so a n d o t v u um versi is that versi

SPEAKER_292: social um and then ami has a my twitter is just my name so it's uh ami yoshimura that's a-m-i-y-o-s-h-i-m-e-u-r-a at an underscore i think is at the end amazing well thank you guys so much for coming on super

SPEAKER_258: excited to see what's up with tech week and can't wait to go see at the versi clubhouse again

SPEAKER_362: amazing oh thank you for having me thanks oh one more thing let's hear it if this sounds like you

SPEAKER_267: if you're um a young builder looking for some of these resources this kind of community our website

SPEAKER_268: is versi.com v-r-c-i.com slash apply is where you can apply to join season one or season zero right now um and so is there an age gap or anything oh yeah we're just going younger so 18 to like 24 26 ish um there's like there's still a lot of magic and the young builder that isn't that kind of gets gets messy when you um have older and um different life situations involved got you so young people

SPEAKER_372: okay yeah awesome also our dms are open our dms are open at any time so we answer all of them so

SPEAKER_374: great thanks guys